Well the Arvis ReGHeB quests folded like a cheap suit with a party of Alfonse, Arvis, Fjorm and Summer Tiki (still need to drop Arvis with Alfonse but hell, if I don't farm one up from the AA, I can always just put the ReGHeB on repeat and have him land the KO instead).

Managed to salvage my Legendary Banner pity rate with a +Def/-Res Gunnthra (aka +1 fodder for my current +Spd/-Atk Gunnthra and a Wind Blessing for my Sothe once I get one at 5 stars). Aside from Dorcas and maybe the Mia with slightly better traits (she really doesn't have much in the way of HP so she'd be taking a hit in the pantsu there), I didn't do too hot this banner (I'm doomed to be short an ear of Scummer Corn, let alone failing to pick up either of the other summer units I missed the first time around). Could've been worse though.

And speaking of worse, this is a terrible round to be on Dire Celica's team. The Taco-me can't even pull ahead with multiple multipliers going for him and I'm still inundated by Red trolls (and that Brave Lyn who failed me last round is now my regular support, which at least is a step up from Level 1 Anna). At least despite the dickishness of round 1's eliminations, I still have three of the four remaining VG units so there's no way I can get screwed out of the Bonus unit bonus (beyond not getting anything but the VG unit's color + whatever your currently locked friend's sporting).

Edit: For the Falchion banner, I ended up pulling a 3 star Adult Tiki as my free pull (also good fucking luck trying to get anybody specific out of this banner, lol). At least for the 4/5 star banner, I managed to walk away with a free 4 star Roy.

Taco Edit: Took 4 stamina pots, an Abel, and a whole mountain of rekerjiggers, but I managed to put down Inferno Conquestumi using a party of Cecilia, Ursula, Brave Roy and Axzura. Whew. Now that the most pressing matters have been attended to, I'm finally able to polish off the two sets of Feb Story Mode quests as well as March's Infantry Training Tower quest.

VG Edit the 3rd: And the feathers keep on rolling in. Now its down to Tasteless Joke Celica versus Grendel.

Ninfivedo Direct Edit: You know, its so highly unusual to get a banner announcement so far in advance that I suspect that the recently announced Nintendo Direct will not only have actual deets on FE Switch, but that whomever gets announced during said Direct will end up as March's banner (don't worry Leif, you'll get in before the next FE Lord does (provided FEH is still around by then......)).

:V

Meanwhile Team "Seriously? Why the fuck did they make her even worse!?" Celica has no chance of winning this VG, but I don't give a fuck because I'm still cleaning the hell up, -100 Flags be dammed. I guess that's the one thing I actually do like about this mode is that I don't need to obsess over spreadsheets, IVs, merges and the RNG to kick some serious Whale Tail.

The Sixth Alt Edit: Welp. We're getting Alt Chrom, both Morgans and T_T Gerome for the next round of units (I guess Awakening needed its kids too). I guess Leif can breath a sigh of re'Leif' after all. Also, holy crap on a crap cracker, Chrom is seriously busted (he gets an almost straight up superior Beloved Zofia, plus Chill Def for maximum 'fuck off and die', on top of a horse and free Fury for maximum powercreep). Meanwhile Female Morgan makes my missing of Scummer Corn less painful for being a Flier with a Blue Guard Bow+ Tome and Male Morgan shits all over non-Sothe/Nekura Dagger users all over again.

The Seventh Sacred Seal Edit: Rival Domains is cute so far, lets see how long that lasts since it looks to be a weekly thing (make sure to KO at least 20 units before taking out the Castle for maximum points). Blessed Gardens rewards Mountain Dew, which makes it automatically good/cool but is the weaker of the two new modes. The new T_T will be fought on Grima, against Grima. Wouldn't be surprised if the last 40% unit was Grima and Gerome is the Unit Reward.

Eirika's Forge changed her from the Bosley of Bladetome's Angels to Empress Enemy Phase as she copies the highest Buff on a stat from any ally within 2 tiles. She'll also keep her Atk+4 Buff so that she'll basically automatically grant herself Atk+4 whenever anyone's near. Assembling a Tactics Team grants her +12 to a mess of stats. Pair her with Axzura, 5 star Sothe and/or a Forged Light Breath+ user for a solid alternative. Soren's new weapon grants him Chill Atk 3 and the forge also turns it into an Owltome. Lol at Leo's Forge taking away his Gravity effect for reversed Deflect Magic (Magic Deflect?) and a sorta Earthsweep effect where he can shutdown followup attacks if his Def (such as it is) surpasses his enemy's. At least his Magic Deflect can be paired with Deflect Magic for Mage Tanking.

Chose Evil Celica myself in the final round so once again I walk out with no victory feathers. Also just barely was outside overall rank 1000 (~1100), probably because I didn't have a bonus unit to run the last round.

Thankfully since we have all these new gameplay modes it'll help keep voting gauntlets far less frequent than they used to be, at least until they make the mode suck less.

Indeed Rival Domains is the better of the two new modes, it took me some time to figure out how to clear Infernal. After spending way too many runs trying to reach the fort (seriously, it's nearly impossible, and the enemy doesn't even have a limited number of units like you do) I cleared it by just running a full squad of infantry and getting a shitload of bonus points. Tamara's Tacomeme gave an assist here.

Blessed Gardens has really nice prizes but the mode is so lazily designed it really shows that it's just an excuse to make people whale for blessings and Legendaries. At least it was kinda fun to build appropriate teams though, my teams so far are:

Pairing Fjorm with Chrom is pretty cool since Fjorm's biggest weakness is Axes, and with that SPD boon Chrom's at 36 SPD while standing next to Fjorm. If I wanted to I could get it up to about 45 speed by refining his weapon and giving Fjorm Spur Speed. Not bad for someone who's mostly ran as a slow Brave Sword.

Being that I don't have Legendary Ephraim yet I'm holding off on giving out my Fire Blessings, but I'm guessing he won't return before time runs out on the current set of stages so I guess I'll have to run a team without him.

As for banners, funny that they confirmed Thracia so far ahead of time, I guess they wanted to avoid the flood of hate letters if they announced the Awakening banner without that. Leif looks completely wrong without his 80s poofy hair but at least Nanna has her nonsensical anime sideburns. With none of the Fallen Heroes being demoted I guess it's natural to expect none of the new Awakening ones to get demoted either. Certainly not Chrom, Morgan M has a Prf Tome and Morgan F is a flying mage with a full set of skills. Anyway I'll likely pass on the banner, but if the next TT requires us to get one of them I guess I'll have to try.

This is mostly a preliminary estimate since additional Legendaries could easily cause things to pivot (plus, not everybody is in their final positions *cough*Eirika*cough*).

My thoughts on Thracia's banner is that Finn doesn't look old enough, but Leif could still pull the early 90s hair during one of his attack/damaged arts. Nanna's hair was sadly toned down and I don't think we're getting it back in any of the alternative arts. I guess the 64 dollar question is whether Nanna will get Earth Sword or some kind of Staff (since we haven't had a new staff user since Genny; not counting Loki who's enemy only so far).

Welp. Zeph Branigan's Infernal GHeB turns out to be on the easier side of the spectrum. Of course that Frederick I actually invested in paid off pretty well as it turns out that, even with Fury 3 eating his HP, the combined might of a stat inflated Zephiel and his pesky Blue Mage accomplice wasn't quite enough to drop this brick shithouse on a horse (and of course the attempt left Zephiel completely fucked up too due to eating a Luna backed 61 Atk Slaying Hammer+ to the face).

My Elise with Savage Blow 6 was the MVP there. She carefully chipped away at their HP while the dancers and Reinhardt kept her save. Once the enemy was softened up enough, Reinhardt, also supported by the dancers, went in for the kill.

Oh, and I got a male Morgan. He's going to be part of Team buffbot Eirika.

The new calendar is out and boy that's a shitload of Banners. Four BHeBs too, of which only two are new. Second round of Tappa!, Tappa!, Tappa! is sandwiched between the next T_T and the next VG. And some special maps to round out the set.

I'mma need to clean some houzz for the coming month.

40% Edit: On the one hand, I'm glad they aren't being dicks about 40% access this time around, on the other hand, balls! Sorry Grima, no mountain of SP and HM for you. Also calendar also got edited since FEW's Awakening DLC isn't out yet.

Free 40% was nice of them, means I don't have to torture myself trying to roll for one. Donnel, Robin F and Cherche are all 4* for me so this Tempest might suck for me though, especially since Robin is a really bad unit. Maybe I should give her Triangle Adept so she can at least kill blues reliably.

Tempting to roll for Hector too, but getting 0 greens on my free pull reminded me how awful it would be.

Really, unless you want a specific character a lot there's no reason to roll on anything but Legendary banners anymore (or maybe the 4-5* banner if you really need skills). They've avoided putting completely pointless characters like Karel on them so you're guaranteed at least someone useful.

Free 40% was nice of them, means I don't have to torture myself trying to roll for one. Donnel, Robin F and Cherche are all 4* for me so this Tempest might suck for me though, especially since Robin is a really bad unit. Maybe I should give her Triangle Adept so she can at least kill blues reliably.

Tempting to roll for Hector too, but getting 0 greens on my free pull reminded me how awful it would be.

Really, unless you want a specific character a lot there's no reason to roll on anything but Legendary banners anymore (or maybe the 4-5* banner if you really need skills). They've avoided putting completely pointless characters like Karel on them so you're guaranteed at least someone useful.

Yeah, they've basically turned the banners into Seasonals and Legendaries only now since powercreep and pity breakers kinda make the older 5 stars less appealing and there's now enough Feathers to not feel the need to pull for 5 star Uncommons either. Hell the Counter banner was basically a pull on Red since of the three, I'm only missing the RIker and the Falchion banner it replaced was a one shot for Alm since I was recently pity broken by Lucina.

As for the T_T, on the up side to the freebies, this most recent Three Heroes quest got me to bust out my 3 star Cherche and grind a few levels on her (I can probably work to promote her to 4 star and eventually 5 star now since she's a solid unit and she'd help my Flier Emblem as an alternative to Michalis; though she'd still need to compete with Camilla, Minerva, Airzura and if I bothered, Beruka). That said, I already have a 5 star Level 40 Olivia since it made sense to bring her up and I even gave her a Silver Forge and Triangle Adept to give her some actual combat utility. And I'm thinking about multimerging Donnel up to 4 star +10 since he lost his main advantage of being a high BST non-Dragon Infantry to powercreep (plus his base skill set sucks so merging the spares won't hurt much in the long run). All I can say about Female Robin is that I finally gave her Keen Gronnwolf+ which is about as much as one can do for her since she indeed sucks.

T_T Edit: Well the maps aren't so bad, especially since the bonus units include a Flier to ignore any trouble terrain. The final map would suck more if I didn't have a buff Olivia, but its otherwise manageable. The SSs this time are Obstruct (this is actually kinda interesting because it doesn't use up the B slot or require eating Stahls or Hanas and the effects can be useful in a surprise dickmove sorta way), Res Ploy (one of these days they're going to give us Def Ploy and Arvis will become the downtown debuffer king), and Def Tactic (hope you didn't eat that free VIker for this).

Meanwhile, my efforts at pulling a 5 star anything from the Awakening banner continues in vain as I'm now rocking a 4.5% pity rate.

I think you mean SPD ploy for Arvis- that's the one he's missing and a bunch of people ate Deirdre for it since they came out at the same time (plus we have DEF Ploy as a seal already). Though it won't be a complete loss for people who already did that because personally I think his ideal build would involve SPD Ploy in the C slot and a RES seal to make sure he can ploy other high-RES mages (Or QR if you want to bait with him I guess).

And yeah, Obstruct seems kinda dumb at first but I could see it actually could being pretty annoying to play against on certain maps if you stuck it on Sigurd or some other tanky unit. DEF Tactic is pretty cool since my aforementioned Earth Blessing team is almost a complete Tactics team (Ike gives DEF, Lilina gives ATK, L'Arachel gives RES), but the downside is that Ike himself doesn't get that DEF buff so this could solve that.

Anyway as I expected this T_T is pretty awful for my team of 4* Donnel/Cherche/Robin and now 5* Gerome, especially for lazy afk playing. I opted to eat a 3* Cecilia and a 4* Setsuna so at least Robin could have some utility killing colorless units. Being Brave weapon low-RES units, Cherche and Donnel are great if I'm playing myself but the stupid AI will make them kamikaze very easily. Even auto battling Hard 30 I lose on the final map like 90% of the time, whereas I've been auto-ing Lunatic 35 for a lot of my previous Tempests and probably had better win rates. It really shows how absurdly overpowered he is, even 5+ levels below your units he can still solo whole teams. Even when I'm actually playing Lunatic 40 and using Olivia, I have to make sure she does basically no combat before the final map so she can withstand a hit from Grima (Mine's running Fury since I plan on giving her a Wo Dao if Athena ever feels like showing up again).

My experiences thus far is that Lunatic 7 is going to require reshuffling my reserve teams around for the first time in forever since my first backup team simply cannot deal with Manboobwindow, full stop. But autobattling Hard 5 is fairly easy this go around since the AI will almost never have Dancers initiate when someone with higher damage output can pitch in, so she's almost always arriving at Awakening Endgame with full or nearly full HP and subsequently cannot be stopped barring seriously bad luck like a series of bad rounds jobbing Olivia/everyone else and there's a Cordelia and a Delthea on the field. It also helps that I actually put some serious effort into Olivia/Donnel/F!Robin prior to this (Donnel was part of my second AA team which let him see fairly consistent use for a while; Olivia I had basically built up because I wanted a bullshit Dancer on a Defense Team too (and then proceeded to pull 3 more bullshit Dancers in short order, so usable vanilla Olivia was mainly a bonus) and Female Robin was put back into rotation yet again as a reason to burn 20 Poprocks because I wanted her to have Keen Gronnwolf+).

And yes, I keep meaning Spd Ploy because this time I thought that Spd Ploy was his C Skill (at least I correctly remembered that his Prf debuffs Atk & Res).

Kinda happy I got male Morgan despite many people saying he's underwhelming. He can take out Grima with only a little assistance, meaning my original team is often the only team I need on L7. The other teammembers are Cherche (until she maxes HM), a healer (rotating based on who is closests to hitting a HM milestone) and whatever blue tome/lance/bow/dagger unit is closests to getting some HM feathers. Cherche and Morgan do most of the work though.

A year ago I was struggling to scrape together 4 copies of either Gwendolyn and Draug to run those 4 Armor quests. A year later and I have almost enough unique Armors to fill out three quarters of a Brigade (I guess we still need a Dancer, Dagger and Staff Armor then, huh). But then, by my count, we have just enough available Armors in the game to completely fill a Brigade and still have 1 extra (so I'm not doing too badly in the Armor department; not a lot of Merges though).

Meanwhile Fliers have only enough units to fill out a Brigade and still have 2 left over, so we need some more Flier love, while Calvary can straight up fill out 2 whole Brigades and still have 1 remaining.

Aside from having pretty bad luck pulling the numerous seasonal armors they've added, I lack good IVs on even the basic armor units, so I don't have Gwen or Draug in any usable state. With the lack of armors I'm not sure I can clear Rival Domains on Infernal this week, but I haven't put any effort into it yet.

a healer (rotating based on who is closests to hitting a HM milestone)

I guess another reason I'm not doing as hot on this TT is because I'm not running a healer this time. I usually do, even before they updated healers they were really great to have (and it's not like the update helped most of mine since all of them except for Priscilla are at 4* for me), all you needed was to inherit Recover or Rehabilitate onto one and they were ready to go. Running one without a weapon equipped was a great way to AIdiot-proof your team. But since one of the big reasons to go nuts with autobattle is for HM feathers, healers are kinda off the table for me:

I'd actually get a lot of use out of Mist if I ever get pity broken by her.

Aside from having pretty bad luck pulling the numerous seasonal armors they've added, I lack good IVs on even the basic armor units, so I don't have Gwen or Draug in any usable state. With the lack of armors I'm not sure I can clear Rival Domains on Infernal this week, but I haven't put any effort into it yet.

If its any consolation, my Gwendy and Draug are still fucking useless since they seem to be allergic to +Atk (or 4 star rarity in general which makes them doubly useless since I have to sink 2k in feathers just to fodder them or SI them anyways so that I might snatch more coveted skills from their sets like Killer Lance or Drawback).

And if I could, I'd donate a whole team of Armors for you to use. Best I can do for right now though is offer a Booklyn, Male Grima, or Winters Lissa or Robin (hopefully you still have my number).

As for Radiant Dawn Infernal, I managed it, but it was a squeaker since I wasn't able to reach the Enemy Base and only scored 19 out of the 20 Armor KOs. And even then, I only managed it because of the enemy loadout being so disadvantaged to my units that I actually had a full turn clear of enemies.